News

Some 2,000 council workers in Sefton, Merseyside, struck on Wednesday and Thursday of last week. They were demanding the reinstatement of two leading trade union activists suspended by Sefton council on trumped-up disciplinary charges.

If we accept that a fourth world war has begun — launched through globalisation and neo-liberalism by the economic and political powers of the "developed" North — then the strength shown by the Bolivian social movements has made this country a frontline in that war.

International

Ever Since its launch in July, Linkspartei has been picking up significant support across the German working class. This has predictably led to a concerted smear campaign against Oskar Lafontaine, the party’s best known leader.

When Dominique de Villepin was appointed prime minister of France following the vote against the European Union (EU) constitution in the referendum in May, he promised his first 100 days in office would give confidence back to the French.

Features

In 1919 British prime minister Lloyd George warned the world’s statesmen at the Paris peace conference, "The whole of the existing order is being called into question by the masses from one end of Europe to the other."

I’m originally from New Orleans. I know my immediate family there is safe after a few anxiety ridden days of not knowing their situation. The fate of members of the more extended family is not known and we hope for the best.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve?" historian Mark Naison asked as Katrina presented the world with images of a desperate, impoverished US seldom seen in the media, "a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?"

With hurricane Katrina, class and race divisions have surfaced in the US for everyone to see. Socialists have known about these for some time, but for many others it was a clear expression of what US capitalism has done to black people and the poor.

The population of New Orleans is 67 percent black. 35 percent of black households do not own a motor vehicle, compared to 15 percent of white households.The city has the second highest rate of child poverty in the US. It is the tenth poorest city in the US. The population of the devastated Lower 9th ward has an average household income of £14,600. A quarter of the households there survive on less than £5,400 a year.Across the state of Louisiana, where New Orleans is located, the equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of education every day. Many young black men from New Orleans end up in Angola prison, a former slave pla

Halliburton poised to profit
Earlier this year US multinational Halliburton confirmed that it had hired the former head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Joseph Allbaugh, as a consultant on issues including disaster relief and homeland security.

Reviews

Manet painted this picture in Paris in 1882, only a decade after the working class had been battered in the repression which followed the Paris Commune. It was a time when the expansion of capitalism in western Europe meant rapid industrialisation and mechanisation.